In the phrase "the new sensibility"—it may or may not have been coined by Susan Sontag—the operative word is, of course, new, not sensibility. (p. 272)

[The] concept of "the new sensibility" … is supposed to account for the revolution in the arts …; and for a realm of film-making whose summit is Godard and bottom the "underground movies" or "New American Cinema," as, in its newly sensible way, it likes to call itself. These and many more the Pandora's box of contemporary pseudo-art has unleashed upon us: every kind of plague in fact, excepting only hope.

Who was the Pandora who actually opened the lid? As far as film is concerned, I would locate the moment of disaster—inasmuch as this can be done at all, and it can be done only approximately—in a seemingly innocent scene of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless…. In this particular scene I'm talking of, the lovers have gone to the movies and are watching an American, or American-style, western, complete with thundering hooves and guns. But suddenly, we hear from the soundtrack two idiot voices reciting at each other Apollinaire's beautiful poem, "Cors de chasse."… What business have the characters in a vulgar American western reciting one of France's finest twentieth-century lyrics at each other—and antiphonally, at that, as though it were dialogue that they were improvising?

Godard was doing one of three things here. He may have been trying to make fun of Apollinaire's poem by introducing it into a ridiculous context, or he may have been hoping to elevate the western to the stature of genuine art. Most likely, though, he was merely tossing a poem he had just stumbled on into an antithetical environment to create a comic shock effect. But whatever the intention, the "sensibility" that will indulge in this kind of effect is unmistakable. It is cynical, pretentious, and disaffected. Cynical, because it is willing to make a value judgment in the most casual, indeed backhanded, way; pretentious, because it will allude without justification to something that is supposed to confer intellectual prestige on the film-maker himself; disaffected, because it does not care what the cost as long as it gets its kicks…. [Breathless leaves us] with something that strikes us as sensationalism and showing off.

It is in this direction that Godard has proceeded. One watched with horror the gratuitous but arrogant devices multiply, the idea being to jolt us, if possible continuously…. It is not a mere shock, a titillation, a disturbance or reversal of the established order. A surprise makes us expand and, perhaps, exclaim; a jolt makes us contract and, most likely, gasp. A surprise surpasses the expected, a jolt merely bypasses it. (pp. 272-74)

What are the Godardian devices? To list a few at random: in-jokes, usually verbal or visual references to New Wave films, often one's own; allowing actors to improvise at length while the camera holds their faces in a close-up; using stop-shots on the slightest excuse (usually while someone is photographing somebody) or on none; panning back and forth ad nauseam between the faces of two talkers, often with an object in between them; using a handheld camera on the least provocation…. (p. 274)

Devices such as these, and many kindred ones, are not necessarily bad—they may even be good—but when used promiscuously, repetitiously, excessively, with the notion that they are ipso facto good, they become distasteful and ultimately dull. Godard's "new" rapidly turns into something other, and less, than the traditional: it becomes instant antique. Why do these innovations age so swiftly? Because, having nothing but them to lean on, Godard has to work them into the ground; because behind the devices there is nothing. (p. 275)

A piece of film has happened, and that is supposed to be its justification. It is because it is; it is like this because it is like this.

Or in other words, has the emperor no clothes? How marvelous! Who wants clothes anyway? There is more enterprise in walking naked. Nudity is so much more daring and more real. Well, that may be so in the case of avowed nudity, in nudity for a purpose, say, to show off a glorious body. But Godard's films pretend to clothes, they pretend to be constructs, artifacts, demonstrations of human action; in fact, however, they are nothing: not even nudity, only skeletons, and even those artificial, made of cardboard. Consider the dialogue even: here are two passages from Contempt. "Why do you assume this thoughtful air?—Because I am thinking of something, would you believe it?—Of what?—Of an idea." And again: "Why don't you love me any more?—That's life.—Why do you despise me?—That I will never tell you, not even if I were on the point of death." How pretentiously pseudomeaningful these utterances are, yet even a slightly closer look reveals them to be trite and hollow. Nor will it do to say that in Godard the words are unimportant. In his films, as he himself has proclaimed, "you have to listen to the people talking." (pp. 275-76)

The Married Woman, such as it is, is Godard's best film since Breathless, and [the scene where two girls exchange dating and sex talk], with its schizoid editing and incompletely overheard conversation, works well enough. One gets the feeling that these girls dabbling in sex, the sleazy stuff in the magazines, and the heroine's adulterous, tergiversations are all somehow connected, and part of the moral anomie of our world. But we cannot "really see, really hear" more than a fragment of what is going on in that scene, which is probably what Godard intended and may be just right—only it remains unclear how this challenges us to overcome anything at all. In the "context of the film" the young woman's dilemma is seen as essentially pleasurable, and, except for a very few minor inconveniences, there is no evidence that her sexual ambidexterity is anything but a happy feast for her ego.

It will surely be objected that an artist is not obliged to take a stand, and that the mere presentation of existing problems is a sufficient task. True enough, provided that the presentation is incisive, suggestive, and provocative enough. But Godard's way, even in this more successful film, is merely to sketch in the ambience: sex in the magazines, sex on the posters, sex in the chitchat at the next table—immature, exaggerated, unevaluated sex. Very good; we get the point. But how does it affect the heroine; with what aspect of her personality, formed by what experiences, does it mesh? Exactly why can't she choose? What does the lover offer her that the husband does not, and vice versa? How does the society, if it is to blame, corrupt one in a profounder sense than by posters and periodicals? Godard does not really flesh out and develop the problem; he merely sketches in its context adroitly but without much urgency. And when the characters are to reveal themselves, he resorts to cinéma-vérité and has the actors (apparently) improvising at great, pretentious, vacuous, and boring length, while he holds their faces in assiduous frontal close-up. (Sometimes we are not far removed from the drivel of Andy Warhol.) Granted we do not look for answers from the artist, only for enlightenment on what the issues and possibilities are; but from Godard, we get either obfuscation or oversimplification.

Rather than inventiveness and multifariousness, I would call the hallmarks of Godard irresponsibility and overreliance on the accidental. The film-maker is running off after every whimsical, extraneous notion that occurs to his undisciplined mind, while being, at the same time, tied to the apron strings of chance, which, under the honorific "improvisation," is supposed to work wonders for him. I dare say one may call the mysterious process of creation with equal right by any name: inspiration, improvisation, or for all I care, indeterminacy principle. But there is a vast difference between the distances from the center artists allow their works to wander, between the widths to which authors open their arms to embrace the unforeseen. Godard's invention does not explore so much as it rambles; his camera does not merely welcome the occasional stroke of luck—rather, having had its lens cleaned with a lucky rabbit's foot, it assumes that whatever it stumbles on will perforce be genius. Unfortunately, where anything goes, almost nothing works. (pp. 284-85)

In the cinema, chance is improvisation, or shooting at random, which may pay off under certain circumstances. In Masculine Feminine, when the hero interviews a Miss Nineteen, a silly teen-age beauty contest-winner, the staggering ignorance and coy stupidity of the girl, and the pitiful way in which she tries to minimize and cope with them, constitute a genuine stroke of luck: an obtuseness and frivolity emerge that are almost the equal of any artist's conception of them. Even so it may be questioned whether such an obvious patch of cinéma-vérité blends smoothly enough with the palpably contrived elements of the plot. But in a film like The Married Woman, where a bunch of actors is asked to improvise on metaphysical subjects, or in My Life to Live [Vivre sa vie], where a third-rate philosopher and a tenth-rate actress are expected to produce an impromptu Platonic dialogue, the results are, as they might be presumed to be, paltry.

Of course, Godard's courting of chance takes on more basic forms than bits of interpolated cinéma-vérité…. [Chance] is definitive only to the uncritical mind that accepts whatever pops up; as Godard's Lemmy Caution says in Alphaville, "I believe in the immediate inspirations of my consciousness." (In Peter Whitehead's English translation of the screenplay, the French conscience is rendered as "conscience"—a possible meaning, but surely not the right one here.)

What are these "immediate inspirations" of Godard's? They are the wish fulfillments of a childish psyche, the dreams of glory we know from [William] Steig's cartoons, the games played with toy pistols and machine guns in backyards translated verbatim onto the screen, bang-bang by bang-bang, and ending with a whimper. (pp. 285-87)

[Alphaville is] the perfect masturbatory fantasy, in which a brutish hero, but one with intellectual pretensions, triumphs over all opposition, but opposition so bumbling that one finds oneself taking its side out of sheer compassion. In his Studies in Words, C. S. Lewis has warned us that "when we try to define the badness of a work, we usually end by calling it bad on the strength of characteristics which we can find also in good work." And he gives this among other caveats: "The novel before you is bad—a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but so is Jane Eyre." Well, I think there is a very clear difference between Alphaville and Jane Eyre. It lies, above all, in the nature of the needs. Charlotte Brontë was starving for love, for bare, essential human love, the very minimum and, if you will, maximum to which a normal, passionate, sentient and intelligent human being is entitled to. Godard's need is to compensate, or overcompensate, for puerile, irresponsible, indeed criminal, appetites; moreover, so infantile is his craving for instant gratification that he does not even bother to present the other side of a question or to give us a sense of the difficulties that have to be overcome, or to examine how the physical and intellectual prowess of his alter ego is evolved. Such matters are brushed aside, and Lemmy Caution proceeds with unthinking brutality to triumph over almost completely supine villains. In the end, the opposition's evil takes on an arbitrary, sporadic character, whereas that of Godard's alter ego is deepseated, convincing, and the more appalling for not being recognized as such. (pp. 287-88)

The horrible misconception underlying Godard worship is the assumption that to take all the liberties and perform all the tricks of which no other art is capable makes a film automatically good. Actually it makes it only film; unless one is prepared to argue that film, just because it is not fiction, theatre, or basket weaving, is a marvel, one had better avoid this tack. (p. 290)

The key to Godard's "creation" is—I cannot reiterate it often enough—giving in to every impulse, responding to every stimulus, recording everything in sight. And this is the very thing that gets him friends and worshipers. In an age when indiscriminate thrill-seeking is the summum bonum, Godard epitomizes the common man with his even more common cravings. But ask yourself which great artist became great by reflecting faithfully the yearnings of the little man, and nothing much else? (p. 293)

There is, however, something even more dispiriting than man's lack of ethics, aesthetics, or thought that these films appeal to: his inability to see, his inability to use his senses, his stupidity. "Etre sage, c'est voir, c'est vraiment voir" ["Being wise is being able to really see"], says Godard's mouthpiece in Masculine Feminine, and it is at least a valid half-truth. Modern youth is losing its ability to see and hear, let alone taste, smell, and touch. The basic sound is the roar of the discothèque, the basic sight is the vacant stare of the doped-up, transistorized television watcher. Consequently, the only way to see is not to look out into the world, but in, into TV, movies, happenings, psychedelic projections. One sees only what the movie-maker, for example, shows one. A tree in nature is of no interest; but let there be a tree in a Godard movie, and our youth is ecstatic, "Look! A tree!" It begins to appear as if only Godard could make a tree. Under the circumstances, because Godard puts so much brute sight and sound into his films, he gives the new blind, the new deaf their only seeing and hearing. And that, I submit, is truly dreadful. (pp. 295-96)